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Well there's professional experience and non-professional/hobbyist experience. In your interview you should probably clarify that. They're both different but I

by yogo 13y ago

Well there's professional experience and non-professional/hobbyist experience. In your interview you should probably clarify that. They're both different but I think there is value to the things teenager might have learned working on some toy project.

gaius 13y ago
Sure, and I value that, it's how I got started myself. But the experience of working on your own projects only translates to a fraction of the work a professional programmer does. 10 years experience would put you at the level of a lead programmer, or an entry-level architect.
- yogo 13y ago
  Fair enough. I just felt like that was probably something I was guilty of when younger. If you have no pro experience and you are asked that question then your most likely instinct is provide a number and base it on hobby projects. Later on you realize there are other ways to answer such a question :).
- SiVal 13y ago
  Well, sure, and ten years' experience working for some other company with their technologies and in-house legacy code, libraries, design methodologies, and idiosyncratic ways of using even open source tools is not ten years' experience anywhere else. A 22 year old with ten years of programming experience has ten years of experience doing what he's been doing. He may have built a Mongo-based sports statistics website for his high school. A 32 year old with ten years of corporate dev may have been creating in-house database utilities for MegaCorp's 20 year old Oracle customer database. He's had ten years of corporate database development experience. Is his experience clearly more suited to a Mongo-based startup selling hats to sports fans because his experience was corporate? Or is it not a matter of corporate vs non-corporate experience but just how much experience doing which of the things we need someone to do?
  - RussianCow 13y ago
    Part of the "corporate experience" is working with teams on existing code under strict deadlines. That's not something you can just learn on your own, unfortunately. I would, hands down, take the 32-year-old in this scenario (all else being equal).
  - Pacabel 13y ago
    Regardless of age, I'd much rather take the developer with experience using one or more relational database systems. It's much easier and effective for them to downgrade their knowledge and experience to the MongoDB level than it is for somebody with only MongoDB experience to upgrade to a proper understanding of database systems.

by yogo 13y ago

gaius 13y ago

Sure, and I value that, it's how I got started myself. But the experience of working on your own projects only translates to a fraction of the work a professional programmer does. 10 years experience would put you at the level of a lead programmer, or an entry-level architect.

yogo 13y ago
Fair enough. I just felt like that was probably something I was guilty of when younger. If you have no pro experience and you are asked that question then your most likely instinct is provide a number and base it on hobby projects. Later on you realize there are other ways to answer such a question :).
SiVal 13y ago
Well, sure, and ten years' experience working for some other company with their technologies and in-house legacy code, libraries, design methodologies, and idiosyncratic ways of using even open source tools is not ten years' experience anywhere else. A 22 year old with ten years of programming experience has ten years of experience doing what he's been doing. He may have built a Mongo-based sports statistics website for his high school. A 32 year old with ten years of corporate dev may have been creating in-house database utilities for MegaCorp's 20 year old Oracle customer database. He's had ten years of corporate database development experience. Is his experience clearly more suited to a Mongo-based startup selling hats to sports fans because his experience was corporate? Or is it not a matter of corporate vs non-corporate experience but just how much experience doing which of the things we need someone to do?
- RussianCow 13y ago
  Part of the "corporate experience" is working with teams on existing code under strict deadlines. That's not something you can just learn on your own, unfortunately. I would, hands down, take the 32-year-old in this scenario (all else being equal).
- Pacabel 13y ago
  Regardless of age, I'd much rather take the developer with experience using one or more relational database systems. It's much easier and effective for them to downgrade their knowledge and experience to the MongoDB level than it is for somebody with only MongoDB experience to upgrade to a proper understanding of database systems.